Megan Lowe Dances Celebrates 10 Years
Garth Grimball
Megan Lowe Dances celebrated its 10th anniversary season with the premiere of Gathering Pieces of Peace at ODC Theater this past weekend (the run continues Sept 8–9). A 30 minute iteration of this work was performed at the 2022 State of Play Festival. Lowe is joined by collaborators Clarissa Rivera Dyas, Malia Hatico-Byrne and Melissa Lewis Wong in this dance theater work exploring mixed-race Asian American experiences.
Gathering is episodic. The dance opens with the quartet in separate pools of light, varied in tone and texture, wearing black bottoms and patterned tops of black, caramel and sand. Six musicians contributed to the score and some sections are in silence or soundtracked by noises made by the dancers. The steady eye contact and attentive partnering conveys an overall tone of care peppered with frivolity, see: banana. The movement vocabulary is anchored in swipes, squats and spirals.
Over the past decade Lowe has animated theater and non-theater spaces with her integration of contact improvisation weight sharing into physical architectures. The cross beams and railings of the theater support lifts and swings as much as the dancers. Gathering is at its strongest and most inventive when it upends the accepted relationships to objects and materials. In one section the dancers run across the first two rows of seats and create a rhythm out of the sound of the dropping and folding of the seat bottoms. It’s a familiar sound made unfamiliar in its repetition; a sonic assumption that the choreography demands the audience listen to with a deeper understanding.
Powerful choreographic metaphors are undercut by the literal. Throughout Gathering there are moments of monologues and song. The monologues invite the audience to know the dancers on a more personal level and offer a thematic throughline of tattooing: choices an individual can make to represent themselves, to connect with culture, to commemorate relationships. The songs, with lyrics like, “all mixed up,” and “sounds like a contradiction,” feel less like another entry point into the work and more like the cessation of thick interpretations.
Taken literally, the title Gathering Pieces of Peace means each section is a piece of peace for Lowe, and presumably for Rivera Dyas, Hatico-Byrne, and Lewis Wong. To witness these artists at peace is a gift in an industry driven by scarcity. They dance with strength and vulnerability. To watch an evening-length performance of peace left me wondering what pieces are yet to be gathered.
